All posts tagged old school

Sweatin’ to the old school: here are some early VuJak videos which I recently found on Hi-8 tapes in my closet.

The first video is from the Digital Hollywood conference in Beverly Hills, 1994. Some friends at Interactive Light lent us an array of floor mounted infrared controllers, so we hooked them into VuJak and let people do what they wanted during the exhibit. Shown in this video is a dancer who got quicky hooked on it and spent a long time with it. Interactive Light, Inc. created the D Beam Controller, which is now integrated into Roland keyboards.

The next video is just us having fun in the studio one night in 1993. We had just gotten the system working well and there were people over for a party, so we turned on the camera. Fun stuff.

And here’s some raw footage straight out of the system from around the same time. Fun with randomness. Always liked this. Still kinda relevant. Bill was so much more fun than GW…

Found in the moldy old noteboks from the 80′s. Here’s a sketch I did one day for a kid’s toy concept. Rikki Rikki Rapp’r.

Idea was to have a physical scratching device inside a bright colored plastic housing – kid safe 2 years old and up. Sort of like the way we used to put baseball cards on our bike wheels to make a clicking sound. There’s a dirth of “hip hop” toys out there now, but this seemed pretty silly back in 1988. Now it’s mainstream.

This was an early website – very web 1.0. Instant Classics started its life as a book, but we decided to publish it instead on this new “world wide web” thing. We’ve gotten lots of great compliments on IC through the years, and it was Yahoo site of the day or some such thing way back.

In 1996, I was hired to photograph in QuickTime VR the General Motors EV1 Electric Vehicle for gmev.com, and it remained online until a few months ago (2006), when a less than positive film about the EV1 was released. I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t comment.

I also had the good fortune to drive the vehicle. The pickup was amazing, and it was utterly silent. Awesome ride.

Below are links to the QuickTime VR movies of the EV1 which I created. I have the source files, film, and video from the shoot, so someday I may create a higher resolution version of this project.

On a geek note, the QuickTime VR files for this project were assembled into a standalone application which was authored with mTropolis. Unfortunately, the presentation will no longer run on a modern Mac or PC (gotta love progress). So most of the “coolness” for that project is gone forever. But the images and animations still exist…

This is an initial rendering of a Tazmanian Devil VJ Station which we concepted for Warner Brothers in 1994. This was intended to be an in-store device. I dont think this ever went anywhere, but we may have just been 10 – 15 years ahead of our time. This would still be a fun device …

Here are two images of Michael Oatman from our first taping of The Leisure Channel in 1987. Mike is amazing. And boy, I think we were just way too ahead of our time. Everything we thought was funny then has come true ….

Here are three of our original EBN images from 1991. These were created for the first Lollapalooza tour. During the tour, we sold the t-shirts and vhs tapes (what’s vhs dad?). And we “toured” in the EBV (emergency broadcast vehicle), shown here. Interestingly, I made the t-shirts with Shepard Fairey of Obey/Giant fame. We made them at his studio in Fall River.

Here’s a copy of the original EBN poster which I created way back in 1990. This highlighted the Telepodium Launcher (TPL), which was built by Gardner Post and Josh Pearson. This was created for a local show, and unfortunately I don’t remember what it was. If anyone remembers, let me know. There was an extra layer of text on top of this image, but I can no longer open the original quark file on this.

Here’s a fairly shitty painting I did back in 1986 while at RISD. Well, it’s not that shitty. Ok, it is. But shitty in a good way. I like it. This was sent to me by my friend Mark Blank, who has kept it all these years. That’s a high school picture of his wife Robin in the painting.